Princeton: Scribal Habits in Middle Eastern Manuscripts Workshop

Scribal Habits in Middle Eastern Manuscripts Workshop

Venue

Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Date

May 9–11, 2019

Conveners

Sabine Schmidtke and George A. Kiraz 

(Institute for Advanced Study)

Most scholars who employ manuscripts in their research tend to focus on the literary content itself. But what about the role of the scribe who typically remains at the periphery of research? How can we, in the words of the NT textual critic James Royse, “virtually look over the scribe’s shoulder” to understand the process by which our manuscripts were produced. The aim of this workshop is to bring together scholars from various disciplines to study the individuals who produced our manuscripts and how they shaped the transmission of literary texts they copied. Topics may include:The qualities, habits and skills of the scribe.

• Typology of changes made by scribes .
• The visual features of the MSS as produced by scribes.
• How can scribal habits help us reconstruct texts?
• Why do scribes deviate from their exemplars?
• How are peculiar readings produced?
• What does the scribe do when (s)he spots an error?
• What is the right spelling of a word and how are orthographic variants produced?
• Is it time for a new paragraph?
• Second-hand scribes (e.g. vocalizers, dotters, and commentators).
• Extra-textual elements in manuscripts

This workshop will focus on Middle Eastern manuscripts written in Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Armenian, Coptic and other languages. Scholars interested in participating may send via email a proposal between 750 and 1,000 words. Proposals are to focus on the scribe and scribal habits (i.e. not a study of the literary text itself). Comparative analyses across traditions is encouraged but not required.

Submission deadline is January 15, 2019. Submissions are to be sent via email directly to George A. Kiraz at gkiraz@ias.edu.

Scholars are expected to fund their travel to/from and accommodation in Princeton. The Institute will provide meals and a conference celebratory dinner. Speakers will be invited to contribute to a collected volume on an agreed-upon theme.

“Daniel” in Select Codices

I have written elsewhere on the (in)significance of the codex for determining the boundaries of an ancient’s canon of Scripture. Probably, historical anachronism has occurred, and we have foisted the significance of our modern, printed Bible on to the ancient codex. So what is the value of the MSS for such studies? They do help in determining a wide range of contents of religious literature as well as provide context for the various orders of books, neither of these aiding in determining a canon.

Though the MSS probably did not help the ancients concretize the canon, they do visualize for us what an ancient scribe or church father meant or conceptualized by the title of a certain book. This may not be a big deal for New Testament studies, but for the Greek Old Testament, we need to take this point to heart. The contents of books such as Jeremiah, 1-2 Esdras, Esther, and Daniel are not very straightforward. Let’s use “Daniel” as a test case by touring some select MS images of the book to see whether our vision of the contents improves. As is well-known, the book of Daniel in Greek was transmitted in quite a different form from the Protestant Bible, taking the form of Susanna-Daniel-Bel and the Dragon in most of the early MSS. We will consider briefly Daniel in Codex Vaticanus (IV), Codex Marchalianus (VI), and Codex Syro-hexaplaris (VIII/IX).